Title
Non-verbal predications

Isabelle Roy (CASTL)

Date:  16.02.2006

Time:  19:15

Venue:  E010 1

Description
This talk is concerned with the syntax and semantics of non-verbal expressions in direct predicative use in copular constructions. I argue on the basis of French, Spanish, Russian and Irish that the distinctions attested among non-verbal predicates fall into three categories (defining, characterizing, and situation descriptive), departing from the traditional view that typically postulates a two-way distinction, most commonly between stage-level and individual-level predicates. I show that the three-way distinction, both a syntactic and a semantic distinction, provides a simple tool to understand a series of apparently unrelated phenomena: e.g. the ser/estar alternation in Spanish, the distribution of long form and short form adjectives in Russian, the apparent optionality of the indefinite article with post-copular nouns in French. I argue that the distinction, which I show cannot be lexical and must involve bigger syntactic units, is to be derived from the internal syntactic structure of the non-verbal post copular expressions.